What is the best way to cover a large hillside with trees/brush?

[rexhea]

It has now slapped me in the face that with all my careful planning of track layout that I have failed miserably in the planning of scenery. I have a fairly large layout (18x24) with three levels that create many hills and valleys. The geographic location is the Southeastern Appalacians. Now, what is the best and most economical way to cover these hills without going bankrupt by purchasing Woodland Scenics products??

[Anonymous]

Tightly spaced balls of lichen over a hill or mountain looks like a dense forest. It doesnt cost too much either, for your foreground trees you can make them yourself. I find my homemade trees look better than than the woodland scenics ones.

[rexhea]

Thanks JPM335
What size (HO) lichen clumps would you suggest? Most of the hilltops are at eye level or a little higher and about 18"- 24" from the edge>

[Anonymous]

That depends on what size trees you want to model. Whatever looks best to you. They will also look better if not all of them are exactly the same size

[Anonymous]

I've seen an article once where you use a fiberfill material. It's one piece and yyou can buy it in a craft store. First you would cut the fiber into a shape that would fit the area that you're doing. You would thenform "trees" by grabbing handfulls of the fiber and kind of kneading it into tree shapes, without removing it from the mat of material. Spray paint and add ground foam or other "leaf" material. Then put into place.
Mark
http://www.webusers.warwick.net/~u1015590/

[orsonroy]

Basically anything that makes the hillside green and clumpy works to represent eastern treelined hills. But, I'd keep a few things in mind:

--lichen really doesn't look like trees unless you really work at it. It's also a natural material, so becomes brittle after a little while and can attract little hungry critters and/or mold. Lichen's also more expensive than ground foam.

--fiberfill balls (poly fiber, batting, whatever you want to call it) works better, but you have to be careful not to actually make "little balls" out of them. Tony Koester did this on his Allegehney Midland layout, and as much as I like the rest of his work in this hobby, I really feel his polly fiber mountainsides looked BAD. You might have a hard time finding black or brown fiberfill too.

My last layout was based around Wheeling, WV, and I had several large mountains on my layout. What I came up with was toothpicks and Woodland Scenics clump foliage. I'd dye the toothpicks in a coffee can full of rubbing alcohol and black India ink, and once they were dry, would stab them into the mountainside (my scenery was then, is now, and will always be made of foam). (Although somewhat time consuming, the stabbing part was VERY therapeudic after a stressful day at work!). Once I thought I had enough toothpicks in place (about one an inch or so), I'd take a roughly thumbshaped chunk of clump foliage and jab it ontot he toothpick. It looks great, and creates the most realistic representation of PA/WV mountainsides I've seen (I went to college in PA, so know about mountains). The best part is that the materials are completely salvageable, and are finding their way onto my new layout, although as bushes and fence posts.

[CBQ_Guy]

Here's a suggestion. Whatever method you use, along the front put more detailed looking trees. It will give the impression that the entire forest behind is as highly detailed and realistic looking.

[Anonymous]

Your Appalachian hills are a lot like my Adirondacks, crying out for trees. I know you said that you don't want to go broke buying Woodland Scenic products, but their ground foam will go a long way to making those clumps of lichen look like trees rather than, well, like clumps of lichen. There are methods of making your own ground foam but I've never really tried them. The large WS containers will cover a lot of trees and add a realistic texture that you can't achive with bare lichen alone.

For deciduous trees, I use the fiberfill method that markie99 mentioned. I use the fiber filling that I recycled out of an old pillow. (It looks like fine cotton fiber but it is synthetic.) I usually soak it in green dye overnight & let it dry completely. It doesn't really soak in and dye the fiber but it takes the edge off the white color. I then rip it into little clumps about the size of golf ball or larger. (For my N Scale layout.) Spray paint it with the cheapest Hunter Green paint I can find & drop it wet into a coffee can full of ground foam. Shake it & remove it with a pair of tongs. Set aside to dry.

The ground foam makes the fiber puff bigger so plan accordingly. For dense hillsides, forget about trunks & branches & glue the resulting trees directly to the ground, using smaller & smaller trees to the rear to add to the illusion of depth. Foreground trees get detailed with trunks & branches. I've been cutting birch twigs to use but there are a number of weeds that can be harvested or purchased in craft stores that work well.

I just started making evergreen trees from furnace filters, bamboo skewers & of course, ground foam. I rough up the skewers, using a sharp knife to scrape some fiber down to resemble dead branches, pre-paint them & let them dry. The filters I got were much less dense than I expected & didn't expect much from them. But I found the lacy quality of the material worked very well in creating the airy look common to real trees. The dense, solid look we see in Christmas trees doesn't really exist in the forests here in the Adirondacks. The filter material I have has a layer of fiber that forms kind of a stiff face for the rest of the fibers. I peel this off & cut the rest into a conical shape. I dip the tops of the skewers into a small cup of white glue & then through the fiber, with the pointy end down. I'll trim the trunks to length later but leaving it long gives you a handle to hold. For now, I stick the pointed ends into a piece of scrap styrofoam and let the glue dry. When dry, I spray each tree with green paint, stick it into the can full of ground foam & shake gently. Remove & stick it back into the ground foam to dry. When ready to "plant" I cut the skewer to length, leaving enough extra to go down into the foam "ground." As with the deciduous trees, I'm using larger evergreens in the foreground with progressively smaller trees to the rear.

My previous layout was covered largely with the poly fiber-type trees & the new one is just the opposite, mostly huge evergreens with the deciduous trees filling in between. I'm estimating that 50 trees will cover about one square foot of hillside to provide the dense forest-look I'm after. Varying heights, with the hemlocks & pines larger than the hardwoods.

I'm estimating the "proper" height of the trees because this is another case of "looking right vs. scale." Just this week I hiked through a forest near here with a magnificent stand of Eastern White Pine, covering about 10 acres with trees over 300 years old and up to 170' tall. Enormous trees for the Adirondacks and over a foot tall each if I were to try to model them in N Scale.

I haven't figured out how far the first three shaker jars of foam I bought will go but when I fini***hem I'll post the results along with a picture if I can. Sometimes I wonder if I should just model the clear-cut forests of the past or the early 1900's when nearly a million acres of the Adirondacks burned.

Wayne

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by orsonroy
--lichen really doesn't look like trees unless you really work at it. It's also a natural material, so becomes brittle after a little while and can attract little hungry critters and/or mold. Lichen's also more expensive than ground foam..

It looks much better if you cover it with ground foam, and to keep it fresh, just spray some water on it from time to time

[darth9x9]

You may also want to consider Scenic Express Supertrees. You can put your better looking trees up front and the 'leftovers' further back.

You can order them at www.scenicexpress.com

Here is a clinic that I made on the fine points of making Supertrees.
http://www.fcsme.org/bcarl/how_to_make_scenic_express_supertrees.htm

[Anonymous]

Interesting, the Supertrees. It does seem to make good speciman trees for forground use. Not sure I'd want to scenic the Appalachians or Adirondacks with many thousands of them but you show some nice results and it seems you've got a production technique that works for you..

The plant that is used to make them looked like a large variety of lichen. A Google search for "Scandanavian bush" turned up the UBC Botanical Gardens Forum where your tutorial was referenced and identified variously as tumbleweed (sagebrush,) reindeer moss or caribou lichen, or sea algae.

Looks like tumbleweed or Russian Thistle (Salsola collina.) Doesn't grow in the wild up here but from the movies, in the Western states, you can't walk ten feet without one rolling by. One post mentioned that boiling it produced unhealthful fumes. Any ill effects?

Wayne

[darth9x9]

Hey Wayne (Muddy Creek),

Boiling the Supertrees does NOT produce any unhealthy fumes - just a slight odor. My friend and I boiled a few hundred a couple of weeks ago for his modules and his wife didn't even notice it (as he was worried to death about her yelling at him).

The bush only grows well in The Netherlands. Many have tried to grow it in Germany and the US but with poor results. It appears the bush needs turbulent air to make it grow fuller to produce nice looking trees.

[cwclark]

I use fine steel wool for hill side foliage..(just don't get it too close to the track so that the wheels on the engine can pick it up any broken pieces of steel wool and cause a short)..the steel wool is cheap and it makes a great hillside foliage scene...I take the steel wool, roll it into various shaped balls, spray paint it in two different colors of green, usually a light green and a dark green (the two shades create cloud shadows above the tree tops when its put on the layout in same color clusters) I then hot glue the balls of steel wool on the hill right next to each other until the entire hill is covered in green steel wool...as the hill slopes closer to the viewing area, I then put in trees made from woodland scenics...so the effect will look like trees and bushes close up, and then it will blend into the steel wool with the look of many trees and bushes towards the back and top of the hill...Chuck[:D]

[jfugate]

QUOTE: Originally posted by cwclark

I use fine steel wool for hill side foliage

Using steel wool for anything on a layout is considered to be a *bad idea* because you'll get filings in your loco motors. Also, there are many products that work just as good or better than steel wool, so why chance it?

I've never found the need to resort to steel wool for any scenery in nearly 40 years in the hobby.

[cwclark]

i never had a problem with using the steel wool just as long as it's not in the vicinity of the track...after it is painted the paint keeps it in tact on the top and the hot glue keeps it in tact from the bottom... also, i use it in the back ground scenes not in the foreground...different strokes for different folks...I do overhaul and clean my engines once in awhile and have never found them full of steel wool shavings......I like the steel wool becuase I can make hundreds of trees for under $10.00...Chuck[:D]

[Anonymous]

Here is something to think about: The eastern mountains have a high percentage of evergreen trees of one sort or another.
What I've done: Go to several thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales - you name it, and look for old christmas trees. The plastic kind. Look at the branchs and see if the little (branchlets?) parts don't resemble small trees. I cut them apart while watching TV or just nothing else to do. In an evenings time you can have several hundred small trees.
As you cut them off, stick them in some white foam - the kind that makes a mess when you cut it. Bunch them closely and pretty soon you'll have a forest.
To use: Poke holes in your hardshell - plaster - whatever you use and stick the "trees" Into the ground. Every so often, spray one with red or brown primer. Thats the cheep 98 cent stuff at the discount store. When you have them stuck where you want them, spray lightly with hairspray and "drizzle" some ground foam over them. They really look good as background. Some of the better ones can be used up front.

[fischey]

For some of us, modeling with really cheap plastic trees also helps. We use plastic conifers used by the baking industry for birthday cakes and christmas theme cakes. Their trunks can be elongated using bamboo skewers. Use hairspray and dip them in your favorite foam mixes. Although I would not recommend using these for a forest, there are conifers that look like this in certain parts of the country-- the northeast and northwest, and west, as young spruce or larch. Lots of these also show up in Europe as tannen. These make great small young stands and garden trees for HO, and they go in quickly. Expect to pay about 10 cents a tree when you buy a large bag from a bakery supply.

[Anonymous]

Weeds... lots and lots of weeds. Take a walk in a meadow or along the roadside of an industrial park and look for weed tops that could be trees. Yarrow works well, so does goldenrod with a little trimming. I've also used some garden plant's dried flower heads. Once you start looking, opportunities abound all over the place.

But they really still look like weeds. I bought a gallon of dark green latex paint from Home Depot (or some paint stores) which was returned for the wrong color. $5 for a gallon. I then dip the weeds into the paint, and let some excess drip off before rolling them in a cardboard box with Woodland Scenics Ground foam (cardboard box left over from a case of beer - also free and enjoyable obtaining) One large bag of ground foam does a LOT of trees in this manner. I used at least two colors and one bag of each was enough for a 3'x11' section. Let the trees dry in a scrap piece of styrofoam (free for the asking from a construction site)

For filling in a hillside, as long as you have most of the weed head covered, it is ok. Because the next step is to plant on the hillside. First, drill holes or poke in a few spaced apart. Once these are in place, you can then just put more "trees" in the spaces as long as the "trunks" aren't floating in the air. They fill out a hillside fast.

For more detailed foreground trees, I take one of the basic weed trees and spray with hairspry before giving them a second roll in the foam. Also, you need to model the edge between your trees and whatever is in front. I find some fine lichen does the trick. I don't use too much ground foam for these, as the difference in texture looks good to me. Also, you'll find yourself with some broken weed heads and bits of lichen left over. I hate to waste anything. So I bought a used blender at a yard sale ($2) and chop up the weeds and lichen in it. This mix I spread on the boundary line as well and hold in place with some diluted white glue. While the glue is wet, sprinkle on a tiny bit of ground foam. Instant Cheap "Weeds".

One more thing. When building my scenery, I construct some very steep hillsides in back of more gentle ones upon which I plant these trees. Cover these with lichen. To economically use the lichen, I cut the clumps in half from the coarse end to the fine end and hot glue them to the hilside. Apply from top to bottom. Some inexpensive spray paint cans then blend these clumps together. Once this coat as dried, I apply a light light coat of grey primer. These steps reinforce the illusion of distance given the steepness of the hill, the contrast between the lichen tops and the ground foam trees and the grey haze from the primer.

Good luck... If I can dig out the old photos, I'll try to post them later!

dj

[ClinchValleySD40]

Bill Carl, excellent clinic. Thanks, I'll use it.

A great bu***hat will give you excellent tress is Sedum. Very common garden plant. Try to get the variety "Autumn Joy". If you have a significant other that is into gardening, they'll love it, all gardeners do. Cut the "flower" clusters off in the spring.

Using poly fiber is great for large areas of backround trees. Something to watch for is around Holloween Michaels carries it in black. Saves you the hassle of painting the white stuff.

[Anonymous]

My friend has used a fairly long nap, multilevel, sculpured , multi-shaded green carpet, glued to a backboard. This of course, could be sprayed with other shades of green, or even spot painted.

[Anonymous]

I think the toothpick and clump foliage method looks really good. If your layout has a plywood top like mine, build up hill sides with foam board. You can use toopicks, but they're kinda short. Using different lengths of narrow dowel or even nails of different sizes will keep it from looking like a green blanket. Just stick em in the foam, paint the whole thing an earth color, then glue the clump foliage on, with ground foam applied here and there to vary the coloring. They make the foliage in different shades, so you can do that too. The idea of using nice trees like the kind Woodland scenics sells in kits along the woodline combined with lichen bushes here and there will help hide the fact that the other trunks are just nails.

[brothaslide]

Go to your local nursery and buy plants, trees, seeds, etc. Go to the hill side, dig holes, plant, and then water.[:D][8D][:D][8D][:o)][:o)][:o)]

I couldn't resist.[8D]

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by darth9x9

You may also want to consider Scenic Express Supertrees. You can put your better looking trees up front and the 'leftovers' further back.

Hi BIll,
Looking again at the material used, I find that it seems to be offered by hobby retailers in the UK as "Sea Moss." It looks like the best material for realistic hardwood Eastern trees that I've seen yet & the method you demonstrate looks like it could be be efficient for covering large areas. I'm modeling the 6 million acres of the Adirondack Park & need lots of trees. (Ok, not all 6 million acres, but you can see them from my layout.)

Needless to say, I'm looking for a supplier where I can buy the material in bulk. The stuff does not seem to be cheap but I can't afford the Scenic Express retail price for the amount I'll need.

Wayne

[Anonymous]

Here in S. Ontario we have a lot of sumac growing wild. In the fall the dried flower heads look like individual trees. Dip 'em in green paint, clothespin them upside down to dry. Glue a pin or small nail to the stem and you've got yourself some decent looking trees. If you're really ambitious you can paint the stems with flat black or dark brown as well. If you are really, really ambitious you can use some floral tape to build up the stems to look like real tree trunks for teh ones you want to use down in front.

[rexhea]

QUOTE: Originally posted by brothaslide

Go to your local nursery and buy plants, trees, seeds, etc. Go to the hill side, dig holes, plant, and then water.[:D][8D][:D][8D][:o)][:o)][:o)]

I couldn't resist.[8D]

Now that's an idea!! That's better than changing to a winter scene with no folliage.[:D][:D]

There have been terrific ideas posted here and I certainly appreciate every one of them and hope it helps others as it has helped me. You make a new guy feel welcome.

Tks to all,
REX